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Hello everyone,
I've returned to the game after being away for a wile, and would like to share my 2 cents on the reforged update, since it brought a lot of changes. Now, since most of the things I'll be pointing out won't be in positive context, I'd like to point out that I loved and still love this game and exactly for that reason I think that a dose of constructive criticism can only improve things.
To kick things off I'd like to address new progression system. I've seen that there was already a lot of negative feedback on this one, and I agree with most of them but there are a couple of things that weren't mentioned in the posts I've encountered. The biggest problem, in my opinion, with releveling weapons is that it's strictly for the purpose of releveling. There's nothing constructive that you can do while levelling that pushes one of the bars of progress that we have in this game. You could argue that you could be doing the levelling in escalations we haven't maxed out, however there's a gap between level 10 and 15 of the weapon where you're too strong for 1-13 and too weak for 10-50. You could always be carried by the group, but then you won't be a constructive member of the team, and your team won't have a fun time reviving you on every miss-dodge therefore you're impacting their play experience as well. Now, my observation in regards to levelling vs crafting is that in the old system we had "good enough breakpoint" while, currently, that's missing from current system. Good enough point used to be +10 where you get the +3 mod, and anything higher than that is nice to have but not mandatory for end game content, the difference was there for sure, but you could preform well enough with +10. Currently, especially with lower tier gear, you're ether going with improved version which requires re-levelling, or you're going with a "placeholder" gear which won't do you much good. And that's essentially what's missing from the current progression mechanisms, levelling is tedious process and in it's current form it would be perfect for making good-enough item exceptional, however to get it to a working point it's truly awful.
Which brings me to my next concern and that is monetization system. With new changes all of the currencies in game found their use which is fantastic, however the rate you get them with, along with the experience is questionable. I won't discuss the rate for premium currency, as it's out of my ball park and it wouldn't be fair to compare it to other games such as warframe which has much larger player-base, however necessity for it is called for. When it comes to levelling you have a time saver, and the only way to passively level the weapon, and that is bounties which speed up the process of levelling by a lot, however that requires you to pay for it. It's easy to spend the regular currency nowadays due to the costs of the nodes in slayers path, which is a great idea kudos on it, and the only way to earn money efficiently enough is through boxes which give you a random amount 500-8k (from my experience). The rumour quests have integrated option for skipping which in itself means you're aware that it's not fun for anyone and the only way to get to that dye or cosmetic peace is to pay up the same amount you'd pay for it in a shop. So in a way I'm afraid that the message that's being sent by the game is pay up or no fun allowed, you're going on a hamster wheel for a couple of weeks. Again you could argue that all of it is still achievable through regular farm, however where's the point where time-savers become mandatory (or pay to win if you will) and up until which point is it a convenience I'd leave it with you to decide.
And just one last fact worth mentioning is that currently there's 269 items in the game that are improvable (sorry if I missed the count, but even if I did it's not by much) that would mean that if you're completitionist it would take 269 levelling cycles just for the sake of it, or represented in hours (8 hours 1-20 is some optimistic estimation that I've found) it would take 2152 hours just to get all of the gear that's provided by the game to a new good enough state :)
TL;DR: Progression system relying on releveling only is deeply flawed and needs to be addressed.
Edit: Added tl;dr
Edit2: Formatting
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